Dr. Peter J. Weiss

Today I’d like to talk to you about TV.

Now it’s not my job to tell you how to live.  Don’t get me wrong here; I’m not try­ing to tell you how to live, but let’s have a friendly talk about tele­vi­sion. Do you know the aver­age Amer­i­can watches over 30 hours of TV a week? Thirty hours – that’s amaz­ing!  It’s like a three-quarter time job.

Now I don’t watch any TV a week. That means one of you out there has to watch 60 hours to make up for me. This is a crazy, crazy amount of time that we Amer­i­cans are spend­ing watch­ing images come across a box and go into our brains.

The real­ity is that tele­vi­sion pro­grams are not really cre­ated to do any­thing except get you to pay atten­tion to the screen. That’s the whole goal of the peo­ple who design TV shows – to get you to pay atten­tion to the screen. The rea­son  rea­son is so you can see adver­tis­ing in order that the adver­tis­ers can sell you things.

TV is not designed to improve your life, to lift you up, to help you gain new knowl­edge. No. It’s designed for one thing — to keep your eye­balls glued to the screen so that adver­tis­ers will buy air­time.

All of the stud­ies show that the more TV you watch, the worse its health effects.  This hap­pens in a vari­ety of ways. The obvi­ous ones are that you’re more seden­tary because you’re just sit­ting there, and that you eat more while you are in front of the TV.

But other adverse effets hap­pen beyond the actual expe­ri­ence of watch­ing TV. Yes, you waste time and you sit there seden­tary; and yes you eat more while you sit there. But it doesn’t end there. Your shop­ping and eat­ing habits are affected by the adver­tis­ing.

You’re buy dif­fer­ent kinds of food; you crave unhealthy items.  You’re going to be more inter­ested in pur­chas­ing things that have been adver­tised to you.

Now I know some of you are say­ing to your­selves, “Pete, adver­tis­ing doesn’t affect me. I’m immune to it. I rec­og­nize the ads and tune them out.” That’s just wrong. Ads work.  Even if you don’t like it, the famil­iar­iza­tion works.

Don’t think you’re immune. The adver­tis­ers love it when they hear peo­ple say, “Adver­tis­ing doesn’t affect me” because they know it does.

So the adver­tis­ing affects the kinds of food you buy, the type of lifestyle you live, and your other habits out­side of the TV expe­ri­ence. TV also has major adverse effects on our emo­tional health.

The rea­son that you want to stay in front of the TV a lot is because the effects of the shows are either to sedate you and calm you down (zon­ing out) or to excite you and inflame your emo­tions. (Like some of that right or left wing polit­i­cal shows.) Nei­ther of these are good for you emo­tion­ally.

Instead of pro­cess­ing the dif­fi­cult emo­tions from your frus­trat­ing day at work, you’re just ignor­ing them while you’re zon­ing out of the TV. Or the TV’s inflam­ing your pas­sion for no pur­pose other than to make you watch.  Hence our soci­ety of angry TV view­ers.  This isn’t help­ing you or our soci­ety.  I think  that TV is really very harm­ful our emo­tional lives.

All in all, these effects com­bine to make your whole life worse for watch­ing TV. I really believe that, for most peo­ple, most TV view­ing makes their life worse. Now once again I am not telling you how to live. I’m just telling you this is what I think.

So what I’d like you to do is to really think about this ques­tion in your own life. Is TV adding to my life? Is it help­ing me? Is it lift­ing me up? Is it mak­ing me phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally and spir­i­tu­ally health­ier? Or is TV sub­tract­ing from my life? Am I phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally or spir­i­tu­ally less healthy for the TV I watch? You decide, and once you do, act appro­pri­ately.

You can do it.